Backgrounds documents more fully the early concern for women's education, with important extracts from the relevant works of John Locke and Mary Astell, as well as three more of Catherine Macaulay's influential "Letters on Education."

A new section, The Wollstonecraft Debate, provides a wide spectrum of opinions about the woman herself, from the nastiness of Richard Polwhele to the adulation of William Blake, balanced by the cool intelligence of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Criticism contains essays by Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, R. M. Janes, Elissa S. Guralnick, Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd, Mitzi Myers, and Mary Poovey.

A Chronology of Wollstonecraft's life and a Selected Bibliography are also included.